Johannes Brahms and the Train: Musings on Musicians and Steam 385 While Brahms’s connections with the above composers may be somewhat tenuous, it is a fact that within his circle of musician friends, there was one in particular who was smitten by steam. Antonín Dvořák, according to Albert Innaurato, was obsessed by trains. In Prague Dvořák visited the train station every day, writing down the numbers of locomotives and discussing technicalities with the engineers. When he was too busy teaching, he would send one or another pupil to the station to write down the numbers on the engines of express trains leaving for other parts of Europe. In New York City, during his American sojourn in the 1890s, it was harder for Dvořák to follow the trains, but he persevered. Security at Grand Central Station was tougher: only people with actual tickets could get onto the platforms. For a while Dvořák forced his pupils to accompany him on the horse-drawn streetcar from East 17th Street to 155th, where he could watch the Chicago and Boston expresses go by (the day’s favourite pupil got to look through binoculars and call out the engine numbers). Eventually, Dvořák decided the harbour was closer, so he and the students would race down to look at the ships. Watching trains may have even contributed to Dvořák’s death. The composer contracted influenza in 3.1904, after spending a day watching the trains at the station in Praha. Dvořák died four weeks later.18 What do we know about Brahms and his own attitude towards trains? I’m not aware of any comments in his writings to show that he had any concerns, fears, or complaints about trains and train travel.19 On the contrary, the comments related to train travel that do appear seem to indicate that he found it to be a comfortable experience, even though according to Jan Swafford he chose to travel in second class, the » comfortable but simple « middle of the three main ticket classes of those days.20 I quote a typical comment from a letter Brahms wrote to George Henschel in 5.1881: Brahms, in Vienna at the time, advised that he would be in Pressbaum that summer, just a short distance from Vienna (24 kms.), and stated:I [Brahms] shall be only a short distance away by rail, which, however, I always travel with great pleasure.21 18 Albert Innaurato: Closely Watched Trains, in: Opera News 58 (1993), p. 66.19 Other wheeled transport didn’t fare so well, apparently. Leon Botstein reports that J.V. Widmann, in his » Johannes Brahms in Erinnerungen « (1898), notes that Brahms didn’t care for the bicycle. See Bot-stein: Time and Memory. Concert Life, Science, and Music in Brahms’s Vienna, in: Brahms and His World. Revised ed. Walter Frisch and Kevin C. Kernes, eds., Princeton & Oxford 2009, p. 4. 20 Jan Swafford: Johannes Brahms. A Biography, New York & Toronto 1999, p. 428. As illustration of the different railway classes in the nineteenth century, see examples from a commissioned series of watercolours showing the different classes in French trains, done in 1864 by Honoré Daumier:The First Class Carriage; The Second Class Carriage; The Third Class Carriage [in the collection of the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, USA]. See reproductions and commentary on all three art works in this series in: <http://www.artble.com/artists/honore_ daumier/paintings/the_ third-class_ carriage>, 27.6.2011. 21 George S. Bozarth: Johannes Brahms & George Henschel. An Enduring Friendship (= Detroit Mono-graphs in Musicology/Studies in Music 52), Sterling Heights MI 2008, p. 133.